Prepaired

Idea

Introduction

Prepaired is on a mission to break down barriers when it comes to education by enabling everyone to access and share knowledge across the world.

With an innovative approach to learning, Prepaired connects university students based on their studies to support each other. They can post a study request with the questions they have regarding a subject and others can offer to explain it via a one-on-one video call.

We encourage students to teach one another with gamification and the opportunity to practise. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it: the retention rate of knowledge is roughly 18x bigger compared to sitting through a traditional lecture. Therefore, Prepaired is truly beneficial to both the student who teaches and the one who gets help.

Universities (inc. Cambridge) are announcing to stay online for the next semester due to the pandemic. By providing a channel for students to share notes and chat, Prepaired is their solution to interact with classmates efficiently.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Balint and Marton have been working on e-Learning solutions in the last 4 years. They created a high school final exam preparation app in Hungary which was used by more than 15% of all final examinees (15,000+ users).

In the last 9 months, we worked restlessly to understand our users and started the software development:

2019 September: We created a quantitative survey to validate whether students are keen to help each other during studying and whether they are willing to do it for free. More than 80% of respondents gave lesson(s) to at least one other student in the past six months and more than 90% of them did it for free.

2019 October-November: We conducted deep interviews with students to better understand their studying habits.

2019 November: We started to develop the beta version.

2020 January: We reached out to GlobalExam, an e-learning content provider, who agreed to give us 20% commission if we resell their materials on Prepaired.

2020 March: We created a Facebook group where we encouraged students to ask questions and teach each other. In the first few weeks we gained more than 200 members and we fulfilled 14 study requests. The group validated that students are also keen to help people who they don't know personally.

2020 April: We started beta testing with the 20 most active users from the Facebook group. Based on the feedback we are fixing the bugs and made some product changes which will be implemented in the public launch in September

Monetisation strategy

We will start generating revenue with two revenue streams:

1. Highlighting fee - for £0.99 students are able to highlight their public study requests to find help faster. It is basically an "ad" for your study request. We plan to implement this revenue stream in December.

2. Reselling packaged e-learning contents - Prepaired is perfect for students when they only have a few questions which can be explained by their peers. However, there are great online courses (Udacity, Udemy etc.) when you want to learn something from scratch. We will resell these materials through our site and take a 20% commission. We plan to implement this revenue stream in March 2021.

Use of proceeds

From the funds, we are aiming to launch publicly in September focusing on universities in the UK and then start to generate revenue in December.

67% Product Development: We are expanding the development team.

12% Sales and Marketing: We are building out partnerships with universities and other education-focused non-profits.

21% Operations: co-working space, legal, accounting costs.